


From the Hunting Come

by Vallis_Vaporum



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad)
Genre: Abandonment, Devils, Drinking, F/M, Hell, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29060598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vallis_Vaporum/pseuds/Vallis_Vaporum
Summary: Ay at the end of seven years, Faerie pays a teind to Hell, and most of the time, there's no one waiting at the crossroads, is there?A tithe is delivered, the Brass Embassy throws a party, and one Fallen Londoner wonders who's going to be there for him.
Kudos: 3
Collections: Tam Lin Fan Lin





	From the Hunting Come

Imyrr was mostly asleep when a devil knocked at his door.

He sat up in bed with a disgruntled sound, frowning when he saw that the Sardonic Music Hall Singer was already lacing up her boots. As he watched and as the knock came again, she settled her neatly-patched fox stole around her shoulders and tipped him a broad wink.

“Now don't go pretending you wanted me to stay,” she said. “I know better.”

He had, actually, but he smiled, shrugging.

“I wouldn't have minded.”

“I have other business to tend to, my gem,” she said briskly.

“And other lovers as well?” he asked, and she wrinkled her nose at him with a smile.

“Just so. You're sweet, but hardly a dependable sort.”

The knock came again, and Imyrr sighed after the Sardonic Music Hall Singer with cow eyes, making her laugh.

“I wouldn't have to be dependable if you just robbed me,” he offered. “I could afford it. Stay. Rob me blind, I would let you. Set yourself up as the Sardonic Queen of Spite. You'd be gorgeous and terrible.”

“And where would that get me, robbing the likes of you? Your friends would have my soul cut out before I got two blocks. Are you going to get that?”

“If they're such good friends, then they can wait,” Imyrr said, reaching for his clothes.

When the knock came a fourth unlucky time, he let out a long breath.

“How about a kiss before you break my heart?” he asked, and laughing, she tucked one in the corner of his mouth -”save it for later”- and then she stepped behind him as he opened the door.

“You do like to keep a man waiting,” said the Affectionate Devil with an unoffended smile. “Another moment, and I would have gone on without you.”

“I'd have gone chasing after you like a puppy, I promise,” Imyrr said. “Here, just look at me for a moment, all right?”

“One of my favorite things,” the Affectionate Devil said dryly, but he kept his garnet eyes on Imyrr as the Sardonic Music Hall Singer sidestepped him and trotted for the foyer, her eyes on the carpet and her hand likely fingering a saint's medal in her pocket. The Affectionate Devil glanced after her when she was safely by.

“You should tell her we're not inclined to go snipping souls like they were daisies,” he said with a frown, and Imyrr shrugged.

“I have. She don't quite believe me, given where I like to stay.”

He knocked an amused knuckle against the ornamentation that gilded the door to his suite, a rather naked young thing being dragged down to a pit of sulfur as one beseeching hand reached up. It was par for the course for the Brass Embassy which lurched into rococo by way of Dante more often than not, and mostly, unless he had guests, Imyrr had stopped noticing.

The Affectionate Devil snorted, shaking his head and linking arms with Imyrr as they made their way down the hall.

“You just like it here because we keep the water hot,” he said. “If we didn't offer that and room service that reaches into 1924, you'd be just as pleased to make your bed at the Royal Beth.”

“Give yourself some credit,” Imyrr said cheerfully, “The company here's much prettier.”

“All this he says, and yet still he clings to his soul, to that undignified scrap, that worthless rag, that _fashion disaster...”_

Imyrr started to shrug it away as he always did, but the Affectionate Devil's claws pricked lightly on his arm, drawing a spiral just below his elbow.

“You were better without it, you know,” the Affectionate Devil said nonchalantly. “You had so much fun. I remember-”

“I don't,” Imyrr said shortly. “I don't remember much about that time at all.”

“I could tell you ...”

“No. Leave off, right?”

The Affectionate Devil subsided into a sullen silence, and Imyrr sighed.

“Look, when I next feel like being rid of that particular mortal encumbrance, you'll be the first I go to, all right? The minute I'm done with it, I'll knock on your door.”

The Affectionate Devil turned to him suspiciously, his pupilless red eyes searching Imyrr's face for any sign of a lie.

“And you won't go back to her? I swear, if she had done it right, you would never be looking at me like this right now.”

“She did it fine. Come on. I promise. Right to you. Even if the Quiet Deviless asks. Even if Virginia says please.”

The Affectionate Devil gazed at Imyrr searchingly for another moment and then grinned. He took Imyrr's face between his long hands and leaned in for a deep and drugging kiss.

“I'll remember that,” the Affectionate Devil breathed against his lips. “Don't think I won't.”

“I know.”

They pulled back, and Imyrr licked the taste of cinnamon and burned wood off his lips. He knew that the Affectionate Devil wouldn't forget what he had said, just like he knew that those kisses and the devil's friendly smiles and sly touches would be over the moment Imyrr had his very own infernal contract in hand. He didn't remember very much from the first time he sold his soul, but he did remember that.

“What's going on tonight, anyway?” he asked as they made their way to the ballroom. “I hadn't heard of any big parties.”

“Oh, time above caught up with us again, or maybe we should say we caught up to it. Somewhere in Scotland, it's Halloween. 1403 or -4, unless I miss my guess, but no one keeps a careful count these days.”

“Oh,” Imyrr said, because that almost made sense. “So time for a masque?”

“Hardly, it's not Hallowmas. It's the teind. We're owed.”

“We are?”

The Affectionate Devil nudged him in a friendly way.

“Not you, not yet. Ah, here we are.”

The ballroom, tiled in red marble veined with gold, tall windows draped in burgundy and honey, was full to bursting, and while he knew many of the devils there, he did not know them all.

“We've had a few lately give us the slip,” the Affectionate Devil said with a nod. “We're a little eager, as you may guess.”

Imyrr hadn't, but then his companion brightened up.

“Oh well, doesn't _she_ always end up in the cream...”

Imyrr followed his gaze to the Quiet Deviless, who clung with fainting charm to the elbow of a churchman of some renown. He looked righteous, strong and correct against the tides of Hell, confident of his ability to stand against the wickedness around him. Imyrr gave him a week, and that only because the Quiet Deviless was just off a recent victory over a famous zee captain.

“Darling, you don't mind if I go over, just to say hello, keep my hand in, as it were?”

“Of course not. Have a good time.”

The Affectionate Devil gave him a sly wink before slipping off, and Imyrr threaded his own way through the crowd, nodding here and there, taking the drink that someone pressed into his hand with gratitude.

_Too loud,_ he thought now that he was alone. _Too loud, and too lonely at that._

His loneliness had just about beat out his curiosity when the crowd shifted, every devil in the place turning as if their heads were on strings and their breaths going still all at once. A moment later, they broke into excited cheers as someone entered by the wide doors at the top of the staircase.

The figure in the portal was a dazed man with flowers braided through his long hair, dressed from another age and with a numb look on his face. Even from half the hall away, Imyrr could tell: he was from the surface and new enough that if Imyrr came close, he'd smell of wind and rain.

_For the rain it raineth every day,_ Imyrr thought idly, and he watched as the man was dragged from the door, devils on every side wanting to touch him, wanting to stroke his hair and shake his hand. He sunk into the crowd of happily buzzing devils, the most popular and the most important person Hell had ever seen judging by the reaction of the devils, and Imyrr had to stave off a surge of jealousy because even he wasn't that stupid.

Instead he sipped his drink and took a seat at the base of the statue next to the left staircase. It was of some non-Euclidian nightmare that rejoiced under the title of a Former Duke. Presumably, the statue immortalized what he looked like after he had had that title ripped away, and for his own stomach and sensibilities, Imyrr found it best to keep his back to it.

He finished his drink, was given a second and then a third, and by then the party tipped sideways like they tended to do at the Brass Embassy. A low buzzing consumed enough of his concentration that it was a little hard to think, and he was too warm and too comfortable to do much about it. Out of the corners of his eyes, it seemed as if things dripped with honey, built into carnelian cornbs and towering into the heights of the hall. In front of him, it was only the Affectionate Devil dancing with someone who seemed utterly in love with him and the Quiet Deviless letting her former church companion go with an indifferent look as he staggered away blinking.

_I remember that,_ Imyrr mused. _I was colder after. Hard to get warm until I got fixed up again..._

At some point, the guest of honor washed up against Imyrr's seat at the base of the statue like some little bit of jetsam on the Unterzee. Up close, Imyrr could see that the man was perhaps in his late twenties, maybe five or six years younger than Imyrr himself, very fair but muscled. His clothes, by Imyrr's reckoning, were a few centuries out of date, someone had taken his shoes, and before Imyrr could stop him, the man slumped against him with an intimacy born of desperation.

“You are a man?” he asked, his voice roughened with a burr Imyrr couldn't quite place. “Please God, but you are a man?”

“More or less?” Imyrr hazarded, and when even that small joke looked like it might shatter the poor sod, Imyrr nodded.

“Yes. I'm a man. I'm not a devil. Here, check my eyes. See? Just a man.”

The man seized his hands before Imyrr could pull away, almost tearful.

“Praise God, that I am not here alone,” he said, and with a sigh, Imyrr slung an arm over his shoulders and pulled him close. The party was moving along without anyone paying any attention to them at all. Imyrr wondered idly if he could simply pop the desperate stranger under his coat and sneak him out.

“So what's your story?” he asked. “Sounds like you asked for something pretty big. Don't worry about whether it was worth it or not, it never really matters.”

The man blinked at him, but he didn't pull away.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Your deal. What-”

It occurred to Imyrr that he was probably being impolite, and he started to shrug before he looked more closely. He wasn't a devil, no matter what they whispered at the railroad and through the halls of Wilmot's End, but he'd been in London for a while now. You picked up a trick or three, and he blinked.

“You've still got your soul,” he said in surprise, and the man nodded miserably.

“So... um.”

“Pray that when your time comes, there is someone at the crossroads for you, my friend,” he said, and Imyrr thought it would be the most bitter thing in the world if the man's heartbreak hadn't swelled to cover it.

“Fuck, but this is too sad for me,” Imyrr said roughly.

He took a bottle of something gleaming and red from a passing tray and popped the cork before handing it to his new friend.

“Here, drink,” he said. “It'll fix absolutely nothing, but at least you won't feel it anymore.”

“I will,” the man said, even as he took the bottle, but Imyrr checked the label.

“Yeah, trust me,” Imyrr said, and after the man took his first swig, Imyrr took it back for on of his own.

A few hours later, with the party in full swing and someone actually doing an inspired acrobatic routine from the chandelier, Imyrr sneaked Michel back to his room and dressed him in some spare clothes and shoes. Michel was by that point more than a little fuddled and confused by all the fasteners, and there was one rather tricky part with the button fly, but Imyrr's clothes fit him tolerably well, and they made their way arm in arm to the entrance.

“But... will they not...”

“I don't think that party had much to do with you, friend,” Imyrr said, nodding at the doorman who let them by with a smart bow. “And anyway, if they want you, they'll come find you, right? And you don't need to be easy to find.”

From the front steps of the Brass Embassy, one could look down over Ladybones, see the gleam of the Moloch Street Station and the glass atrium of the Labyrinth of Tigers. The bells of Saint Fiacre's started to ring, and Michel clapped his hands over his ears, looking out appalled over the city.

“Be this Hell?” he asked, his voice hushed, and Imyrr shook his head.

“No,” he said wryly. “Welcome to London.”

*

Imyrr ended up leaving Michel at the Royal Bethlehem. He had intended to let the poor sod use his rooms, but the manager had taken one look and swept him up with a slightly avaricious gleam in his eye.

“Oh a teind,” he said with something like tenderness. “We have a few here, you know. You will not want for good company.”

Imyrr wasn't sure that _company_ would be what he wanted after something like that, but it wasn't his lookout any longer, and that was the most important bit, wasn't it? Making sure things weren't his problem?

He decided that his suite at the Embassy would be too loud with the party still going on, and with the Revolutionary Firebrand currently moping at the townhouse and Sister Lydia 'borrowing' his place at the bazaar, there was nowhere he really wanted to go.

Instead he found himself catching a hack to Mahogany Hall, where the streets were lined with carriages and landaus waiting for the gentry to exit. He slipped a likely looking thing a handful of echoes to let him in the back, and after a little trial and error, he found a dressing room with a familiar fox stole hanging over a hook, a familiar shade of lipstain in a jar by the little mirror. He paced the room, faintly appalled at how shabby it was, and from the direction of the stage, he could hear a song that struck him as oddly familiar before it escaped him utterly.

“ _In the middle of the night she heard the bridle ring_

_She heeded well what he did say and young Tam Lin did win...”_

There was a tide of applause, and then the Sardonic Music Hall Singer swept in, her cheeks flushed, her hair rumpled and her eyes glowing like anything, or at least they were until she shrieked upon finding an unexpected man in her dressing room.

“What in the world are you doing here?” she demanded, shutting the door behind her.

“Oh,” Imyrr said vaguely. “I should have brought flowers, shouldn't I? What kind do you like, I'll bring some next time.”

“Paper,” she said sharply, looking him up and down. “That's all we get down here, paper and silk flowers. You know that.”

“I'll bring silk flowers next time,” Imyrr promised. “And chocolate too. And wine, something good...”

“What's all this about? Not that I mind being treated, of course. You could stand to do more of that, as rich as you are.”

“I definitely could,” Imyrr said, aware that he was talking faster. “Why don't we start now? Are you busy? Have you taken the train yet? We could go all the way out to Balmoral, if you liked. Pretty country out there, or maybe you'll like Ealing Gardens better? They have some good shops. I could buy you some new dresses or something nice for your mantel...”

He stopped, realizing he had no idea where she lived or how.

“If you have a mantel?” he asked, and the Sardonic Music Hall Singer laughed.

“Come here,” she said with the air of someone doing him a favor. “Get my laces for me. I'm certainly not going anywhere in costume.”

He undressed her and then though there was no need, he did up her wine-red dress with the blackberry buttons before kneeling down to lace up her boots as well. Still on his knees, he looked up when she threaded her fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face so she could see him more clearly.

“What's with you tonight?” she asked, as gentle as she ever got. “Your sharp friends throw you over?”

“I can't want to spend some time with you?” he objected, climbing self-consciously to his feet. “You're my favorite, you know.”

She rolled her eyes, taking his hand up and kissing it.

“Oh yes, me and that awful revolutionary fellow, and that woman dressed as the nun-”

“She really is a nun.”

“And that spy, and the ex-mayor, a few dozen devils, and a Rubbery Man for all I know.”

“Are you done?” he asked, and she grinned.

“I suppose I am for now. Let's go to Ealing Gardens. I've not gotten to go yet. You can buy me something very nice and maybe that'll calm you a little, yes?”

“Thank you,” Imyrr said, dropping a nearly-chaste kiss on her cheek as they walked out. “You're a star, you're-”

He started to say _favorite_ again, and he realized that she would never believe it, and he wasn't sure if he did either. He wasn't sure he could, if he was built for it at all.

“Perfect,” he said finally. “Completely and utterly perfect.”

She was, and he hailed a hack to get them to the station.

**Author's Note:**

> -FAILBETTER GAMES LET ME WRITE YOU AN EXCEPTIONAL STORY!!!
> 
> -FBG will probably never let me write an exceptional story, so thank you to Langerhan for giving me the opportunity to do the next best thing. What a great idea for a collection!
> 
> -I cannot believe I've been playing Imyrr for more than a decade at this point.


End file.
